Ashes
by Cerulean.Phoenix7
Summary: This is where she makes her final stand.


Ashes

A/N: Goodness it's been a while. I think it's been at least a month since I last posted anything _Voyager_ related, but I can say that it's nice to be back. In regards to this tale it is set during the last moments of 'Endgame' as the Borg Unicomplex falls into ruin.

Thanks to my beta, Uroboros75 for the speedy beta work.

Music: Hide and Seek – Imogen Heap

Disclaimer: It's the same old song and dance: I don't own a thing, not even the coffee.

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The sensation spreads over her skin in a web before she realizes what's happening, and even then it's too late. A quick look at her new surroundings drops a lead weight of dread into her gut.

She's been beamed directly into the Queen's lair.

She stifles a curse, expletives thrown to the nearest corner of her mind as her eyes scan the surrounding bulkheads. She searches for the few moments that she has, turning up nothing. She only finds the stains of their bitter deadlock, the lashes of their retorts and the bloodstains of the people that she lost to _her_ crimson hand.

"Very clever, hiding right on my doorstep," the Queen says, her voice unctuous mercury. "Were you planning to attack us from inside the Unicomplex?"

Janeway gives her no answer, her lips tightly sealed by the years of instinct branded into her skin.

The Queen watches her with a bemused puzzlement; in moments, her expression embodied malice. "Not feeling talkative?" she snaps as she struts towards Janeway, looming before her like a hungry black widow, her eyes pulsating with a dark greed. There's a moment of pure, icy fear that pulses through Janeway's veins before the assimilation tubules puncture her skin.

The nanoprobes pour through her veins with both ferocity akin to flame and a horrifying chill like thousands of steel blades ripping away at her. They are relentless as they pave the way for the machinery to take over, devouring her individuality in a swift and efficient fashion. She screams, the pain immeasurable, and no matter how greatly she wishes that certain people were nearby to beam her away from this chamber of horrors, she knows that they will never come; she had accepted this fate long ago.

Her limbs feel like trees that have been whipped by a hurricane, frail and wobbly beneath her. Her vision swirls for an instant as she collapses against the Queen's throne, the cold metal prickling the skin on her neck.

"You and I don't need words to understand each other," the Queen intones, her voice filled with something that Janeway can only classify as a perverted type of joy. The Queen finally has one of the Federation's most valuable pieces under her command.

_But every villain eventually meets their end_, Janeway muses as the Queen circles her, black eyes ripe with pride. The dark chorus of the Collective fills the chamber, but its clarity is soon sheared by a sharp shock that drives through the entirety of the Collective, and Kathryn Janeway knows exactly why.

"Must be something you assimilated," she hisses at the Queen, watching the pride on her face deteriorate into a primal terror that gives Janeway a grim form of satisfaction. After striking fear into the hearts of billions for thousands of years she finally knows the very terror that she inspires.

The fear of destruction.

"What have you done?" she demands, and this time Janeway answers her swiftly.

"I thought we didn't need words to understand each other."

Terror now clutches at the Queen's face as she grips the edges of her metallic throne, clinging to the one thing that she has always had power over. "You've infected us," she says with grim realization. "With a neurolytic pathogen."

Janeway looks up into black eyes devoid of any human emotion or sentiment and feels no fear; the enemy that has infringed upon the sanctity of the Federation for so long is at last on even ground with her.

She replies with a whisper, but it comes out more like a hiss.

"Just enough to bring chaos to order."

There's a moment where the Queen simply stares at her, and the fact that the Queen is very much cornered in her own rotten intentions makes the reality of the situation a little less grim in Janeway's eyes. A shimmer awakens the view screen to their right, and they become witnesses to the obliteration of the transwarp network. A ball of fire blazes through one of the apertures, tearing it apart in seconds.

"Voyager will be destroyed," the Queen says, still clinging to her last reserves to control.

"They're ahead of the shockwave," Janeway counters, her voice echoing off the walls of the chamber as she pulls herself up from the floor. "They'll survive. Captain Janeway and I made sure of that." Her limbs protest, muscles inundated with nanoprobes as she grips one of the skinny columns for support. "It's _you_," she says, her voice sharp like the edge of a knife, "who underestimated _us_."

It's a moment filled with retribution, flooded with the intentions of two lives that have been matched as opponents for years, but there could only be one victor.

_Checkmate, bitch_.

The Queen seems on the precipice of defeat when a clear voice rings through the chaos, and Janeway hears it loudly through her mind. She glares at the view screen when she sees it, a Borg sphere that has assimilated the pathogen.

_One sphere is not enough to change the course of these events_, she thinks as the Queen revels in the voices now joining her in the remaining harmony. Janeway pushes it away, refusing the mental claws that eagerly reach out for mind, hungry for her voice.

That's when the Queen rips her own arm off. It ripples with foreign electricity, something that Janeway attributes to the virus. The Queen continues on and tries to maintain her authority until her leg crumples beneath her, fizzling with the same electric charge that snaked up her arm only moments before.

A final shock rips through the Collective's consciousness and it brings the Queen to the ground. "Captain Janeway is about to die," she whispers, metallic hands braced against the floor. "If she has no future, you will never exist and nothing that you have done here today will happen." Her body convulses one last time before settling on the floor, her face giving an ominous reflection in the obsidian glass. The suit disengages from her limp body, letting the mottled and mutilated flesh go as it withdraws.

_This is it, Kathryn_, Janeway muses as the complex rumbles and shudders around her. _This is what it comes to_. She only has a few moments left, but she knows that even afterwards her ashes will scatter across the sector and land upon the distant shores that she knew once upon a time. She lays her head against the cool metal, her eyes drifting upwards to whatever lies above her in this house of horrors.

She looks up and sees wings; there is no other way for her to describe them. They stretch over the chamber, wreathed in a light that she cannot place. A force reaches out to her, ready to take her from these ruins, and she lets it; she knows that her time has come to an end. She's elevated from her body, lifted away from her mortal coil and gently led away.

And she, her father's golden bird, is free at last.

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_Fin_

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**It may have been brief, but I felt like the Admiral needed a little more closure at the end of it all. Reviews would be lovely :)**


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